Mapping the Metaphor of the
Good Neighbor: Geography,
Globalism, and Pan-Americanism
during the 1940s
Amy Spellacy
We have learned that our ocean-girt hemisphere is not immune
from severe attack—that we cannot measure our safety in terms
of miles on any map any more.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dec. 9, 1941
During his fireside chats, President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged
Americans listening to their radios at home to consult their globes and follow
along as he talked them through the geography of the war using the custommade globe in his study. With these geography lessons, Roosevelt hoped to
bolster support for a war that was forcing people in the United States to reimagine their relationship to the rest of the world. For many Americans, the
global scope of World War II reinforced their sense that the world was becoming
a smaller place, a revised worldview that had emerged, in part, as a response to
technological innovations, including improved radio communication and
developments in air travel that dramatically reduced travel time between the
United States and international destinations.
The Good Neighbor policy, which structured U.S.-Latin American relations
between 1928-1947, was based on a cosmopolitan rhetoric of inter-American
friendship and cooperation that relied on the central trope of the good neighbor.
This essay analyzes how the metaphor of the good neighbor functioned
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American Studies, 47:2 (Summer 2006): 39-66
39
40 AmySpellacy
discursively during the 1940s, focusing in particular on how it emerged out of
and participated in shaping a new vision of the world as an interconnected whole,
a shrinking space in which people developed a sense of involvement in an
international community that transcended the borders of individual nations. I
argue that, on the one hand, the metaphor of the good neighbor relied on and
promoted a normative notion of neighborhood, drawing its meaning from images
and ideals associated with literal U.S. neighborhoods. On the other hand, the
metaphor was an essentially flexible, historically contingent metaphor that was
adapted by Presidents Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt to meet different needs.
During the period of the Good Neighbor policy, the metaphor operated through
this paradoxical combination of inflexibility and flexibility to both promote a
sense of inter-American community and facilitate continued U.S. economic and
political domination of the hemisphere.
I begin this essay by considering the creation of the hemispheric
neighborhood as a strategic spatial project, followed by a discussion of changing
notions of space during World War II and Roosevelt's allegiance to the concept
of the hemisphere at a time when it was being challenged by geographers and
cartographers. In order to illustrate the reciprocal relationship between the
architects of the policy and non-state actors, I examine how the metaphor of the
good neighbor was strategically deployed in state-sponsored rhetoric at particular
historical moments as well as how the hemispheric neighborhood was reproduced
and reinforced by cultural texts and the people who consumed them. While the
social construction of scale is often understood as a process driven by the state,
geographer Sallie Marston emphasizes that "social reproduction and consumption
also play a theoretically central role in the social construction of scale."1 In this
essay, I emphasize the ways that the vision of the hemispheric neighborhood
promoted by the political speeches and writings of Hoover and Roosevelt was
projected in popular cultural texts that circulated in the United States during
this period, enabling virtual travel to Latin America while participating in the
strategic U.S. mapping of the region.2 To this end, I offer readings of several
maps from works of U.S. travel literature written to promote the Good Neighbor
policy as well as the 1945 Walt Disney animated feature film The Three
Caballeros, arguing that the discursive strategies employed by these texts reflect
U.S. imperial motives in Latin America during this period. I conclude with a
discussion of the symbolic legacy of the rhetoric of the good neighbor at the
1964-65 New York World's Fair.
Creating the Hemispheric Neighborhood
The Good Neighbor policy was a U.S. plan designed to gain the respect
and trust of the people and leaders of Latin America, many of whom had become
distrustful of their domineering, interventionist northern neighbor during the
decades of "Big Stick" diplomacy, when the United States sought to manage
hemispheric politics with military occupations of countries including Nicaragua,
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 41
Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. While the foreign policies of Hoover and
Roosevelt were not identical, Roosevelt's more fully developed Good Neighbor
policy can be seen as a continuation of the changes put into motion by his
predecessor. Both presidents were concerned with moving away from an overtly
interventionist model of U.S.-Latin American relations, improving the perception
of the United States among Latin Americans, and forging greater economic and
political ties within the hemisphere.3
As a spatially-based metaphor, the good neighbor drew its meaning from
the geographical scale of the neighborhood. The stability of the metaphor stems
from its dependence on a culturally specific, normative understanding of
neighborhood. When U.S. politicians evoked the good neighbor, they did so
with the expectation that their audiences would visualize a space small enough
to be marked by interdependence and community, in particular a small-town
residential neighborhood of single-family homes, populated by middle-class,
white, Christian families. This image was deployed with the goal of creating a
sense of imagined consensus between disparate and geographically distant
groups, both within the United States and throughout the hemisphere.
Although the metaphor of the good neighbor consistently relied on these
images of neighborhood, Hoover and Roosevelt mobilized it at particular
historical moments as a flexible metaphor adaptable to specific political
circumstances. In particular, the metaphor's flexibility was demonstrated by its
movement from the smaller scale of the neighborhood to the larger scale of the
hemisphere. The use of the good neighbor as a hemispheric political metaphor
allowed the United States to promote a more expansive idea of community,
using images and ideals drawn from the neighborhood to describe the hemisphere,
projecting an image of a U.S. neighborhood as a homogenizing model for the
hemisphere.
On the most basic level, scale is a way to distinguish between different
kinds of places by recognizing the properties of particular spatial configurations,
such as home, community, city, nation, and region.4 The concept of scale helps
to define spaces and structure social and political relationships. Contemporary
geographers, including Neil Smith and Sallie Marston, have built on Henri
Lefebvre's theories of space in order to emphasize that geographical scales should
be understood as social constructs rather than natural categories.5 Marston, for
example, points out that "scale is not necessarily a preordained hierarchical
framework for ordering the world—local, regional, national and global. It is
instead a contingent outcome of the tensions that exist between structural forces
and the practices of human agents."6 These insights on the nature of scales allow
us to see the constructed nature of both the neighborhood and the hemisphere,
and to consider how they work together in the rhetoric of the Good Neighbor
policy.
By designating the space of the hemisphere as a neighborhood, the United
States engaged in a process of strategic rescaling designed to accomplish the
42 Amy Spellacy
political and economic goals of the Good Neighbor policy. Neil Smith suggests
that scale is "an active progenitor of specific social processes" and argues that
"scale both contains social activity and at the same time provides an already
portioned geography within which social activity takes place."1 Smith describes
"jumping scales" as a subversive political strategy that aims to "dissolve spatial
boundaries that are largely imposed from above."8 While Smith has pointed to
the resistant possibilities in moving from a smaller scale to a wider geographical
field, the process of rescaling initiated by the United States with the creation of
a hemispheric neighborhood moved in the opposite direction. By describing the
larger space of the hemisphere with a metaphor drawn from the smaller scale of
the neighborhood, the United States effectively sought to shrink the hemisphere,
creating a manageable, contained space out of what would otherwise be an
unwieldy collection of geographically distant and culturally distinct nations.
With this move, the United States attempted to solidify its position of power
and authority over the region. The rescaling of the hemispheric neighborhood
can be understood in relation to Neil Brenner's concept of "spatial tactics."
Brenner, whose work focuses on critical urban and regional studies, sociospatial
theory, and state theory, has described "spatial tactics" as "techniques used by
the state to regulate, produce and reproduce configurations of social space
adequate to the continued accumulation of capital."9 While the Good Neighbor
policy was designed to accomplish overlapping political, economic, and
ideological goals and was not focused exclusively on the accumulation of capital,
Brenner's emphasis on the strategic structuring of social space on the part of the
state provides a useful framework for understanding the rescaling of the
hemisphere as a neighborhood.
Within the rhetorical framework of the Good Neighbor policy, the idea of
the hemispheric neighborhood was particularly useful in promoting a sense of
community and homogeneity in the Americas. I would suggest that the scale of
neighborhood can be understood as a parallel to or a subset of the scale of
community and that the properties associated with community also form the
basis of the metaphor of the good neighbor. Neil Smith comments that community
is "the least specifically defined of spatial scales" and points out that "the
consequent vague yet generally affirmative nurturing meaning attached to
'community' makes it one of the most ideologically appropriated metaphors in
contemporary public discourse."10 However, while the scale of neighborhood
shares many of the ideals associated with the scale of community, neighborhood
operates as both a social and a geographical category and is therefore more
attached to specific places than the concept of community, which is less
geographically grounded. By applying the ideals associated with community to
the limited geographical space of the hemisphere, the metaphor of the good
neighbor persuasively promoted a sense of inter-American affinity by appealing
to the idea that neighbors are ethically responsible to look after one another and
to work toward creating a more harmonious, egalitarian society in a mutually
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 43
agreed upon bounded territory. The metaphor served to create imagined ties of
obligation between individuals who were unacquainted and were unlikely to
ever meet in person.
In addition to drawing meaning from the scale of the neighborhood, the
rhetoric of the Good Neighbor policy also sought to reinforce the scale of the
hemisphere as a meaningful category. One of the most significant features of
the Pan-American, hemispheric neighborhood designed by the United States
was that it was a bounded, closed space. In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott
examines how and why states have pursued large-scale improvement schemes
during the twentieth century. In his analysis of how the state secures control
over a space, Scott argues that "the more static, standardized, and uniform a
population or social space is, the more legible it is, and the more amenable it is
to techniques of state officiais" and observes that "many state activities aim at
transforming the population, space, and nature under their jurisdiction into the
closed systems that offer no surprises and that can best be observed and
controlled."11 By transforming the hemisphere into a closed system with the
rhetoric of the Good Neighbor policy, the United States created a space over
which it could exert symbolic and physical control. The sense that the hemisphere
should be closed off and protected was particularly pronounced following the
attack on Pearl Harbor, which challenged assumptions about the safety of the
geographical position of the United States. In his radio address to the nation
declaring war on Japan, delivered December 9,1941, Roosevelt suggested that
the attack on Pearl Harbor illustrated the penetrability of the hemisphere: "We
have learned that our ocean-girt hemisphere is not immune from severe attack—
that we cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on any map any more."12
This new sense of vulnerability made the United States more eager to maintain
control over the hemisphere, which was imagined as a buffer zone between the
United States and Axis powers.
The specific spatial strategy of rescaling the hemisphere as a neighborhood
was a kind of re-mapping that ultimately facilitated U.S. imperialism inside and
outside the United States. Maps, on a basic level, are designed to create order,
or the appearance of order, in accordance with the goals and priorities of the
mapmaker. Maps both reflect and shape perceptions of space and social
relationships by offering a simplified, abstracted, and necessarily biased
representation of a particular place. While Scott concedes that the ordering work
done by the state, including mapping, is necessary to create a functional society,
he emphasizes that maps ultimately facilitate state control.13 In his work on the
discursive nature of maps, cartographic historian J.B. Harley examines how
visual representations of power are embedded in maps and suggests that maps
are used to create structures of social relations that support the status quo. He
argues that cartography is a form of knowledge and power, that maps are a
language, and that the iconology of maps reveals a deeper level of meaning.14
Harley is among those scholars who remind us that despite the seductive,
44 Amy Spellacy
apparently scientific representation of space provided by maps, they are not
straightforward reflections of the physical world:
Maps cease to be understood primarily as inert records of
morphological landscapes or passive reflections of the world
of objects, but are regarded as refracted images contributing
to dialogue in a socially constructed world. . . . Both in the
selectivity of their content and in their signs and styles of
representation maps are a way of conceiving, articulating, and
structuring the human world which is biased towards,
promoted by, and exerts influence upon particular sets of social
relations. By accepting such premises it becomes easier to
see how appropriate they are to manipulation by the powerful
in society.15
By enabling both the rhetorical and physical mapping of the Americas, the
metaphor of the good neighbor facilitated continued U.S. domination of the
hemisphere. Through the creation of the construct of the Pan-American
neighborhood, the United States participated in a process of imperial mapping
that conveniently justified U.S. appropriation of Latin American resources during
World War II. Because we are neighbors, the United States argued, we have a
right to your political allegiance and your natural resources.
Re-imagining the Hemispheric Neighborhood
After Pearl Harbor
In a 1941 essay in The Saturday Review of Literature, Alexander Cowie
argues for the importance of studying foreign languages "in a world so shrunken
geographically that nations once regarded as remote now become virtual
neighbors."16 Cowie's use of the phrase "virtual neighbors" to describe residents
of foreign countries indicates the extent to which an expanded understanding of
the category of the neighbor had emerged by the early 1940s. With his
announcement of the Good Neighbor policy in 1933 and his promotion of the
good neighbor ideal through the Good Neighbor League during the 1930s,
Roosevelt had propitiously laid the ground work for a war-time policy that
attempted to dislodge the U.S. tendency toward isolationism and encourage
U.S. residents to imagine themselves as neighbors to foreigners in far-flung
places of the globe.17 Conveniently, the political need to transform Latin
Americans into neighbors coincided with developments in mapping and
geography that emphasized the interconnected nature of the world and favored
the use of globes, rather than maps, to represent the earth. While these
developments supported Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy and his general view
of the world as an interconnected system, this new view of the world also deemphasized the scale of the hemisphere, a crucial geographical concept for the
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 45
Good Neighbor policy. In his war-time speeches and writings relating to the
Good Neighbor policy, Roosevelt incorporates the elements of this new
geography that support his cause, while ignoring those that do not.
With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it became
eminently clear to the United States that it was not out of the range of the reach
of its enemies. This catastrophic event illustrated that the world needed to be
imagined as an interconnected system. If the attack on the Hawaiian islands
forced Americans to rethink the presumed geographical divide between East
and West, the declarations of war by Germany and Italy would add to the sense
that the world was closing in on the United States.18
When the United States entered the war, Roosevelt believed that people
needed to be taught about world geography in order to understand U.S. military
strategy and the global scope of the war. He reasoned that an understanding of
geography would be essential in gaining the approval to send large numbers of
American troops to fight in remote locations around the world and dedicated
several of his fireside chats to educating the public about the geography of the
war.19 In a radio address delivered on February 23, 1942, Roosevelt asked
Americans to take out their maps and follow along as he updated them on the
status of various battles around the world.20 He suggested to the American people
that the global nature of the war required new strategies and a new understanding
of geography:
The present great struggle has taught us increasingly that
freedom of person and security of property anywhere in the
world depend upon the security of the rights and obligations
of liberty and justice everywhere in the world. This war is a
new kind of war. It is different from all other wars of the past,
not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography.
It is warfare in terms of every continent, every island, every
sea, every air-lane in the world. That is the reason why I have
asked you to take out and spread before you (the) a map of
the whole earth, and to follow with me in the references which
I shall make to the world-encircling battle lines of this war.21
In this address, Roosevelt uses geography to encourage a sense of obligation
and investment in the war, prompting Americans to see themselves as a part of
a global system. He comments, "We must all understand and face the hard fact
that our job now is to fight at distances which extend all the way around the
globe."22
Roosevelt himself was an enthusiast of geography and maps. In 1942,
General George C. Marshall presented Roosevelt with a 50-inch globe as a
Christmas gift from the U.S. army.23 Roosevelt kept the globe by his desk in the
Oval Office so that he could plan military strategy and follow troop movement
46 Amy Spellacy
during the war. Other wartime leaders, including Winston Churchill, were also
given replicas of the huge globe, which was manufactured by the Weber Costello
Company of Chicago Heights, Illinois, under the direct supervision of the Office
of Strategic Services and the War Department.24 The globe was created at a
scale of 1:10,000,000 (157.8 miles to the inch) and mounted on rubber rollers
so that it could be rotated in any direction. In an editorial in The Geographical
Review, written shortly after Roosevelt's death in 1945, Isaiah Bowman describes
Roosevelt as an aficionado of geography. Bowman suggests that Roosevelt's
experiences as a sailor and a navigator instilled in him a life-long interest in
maps and comments that during his period of convalescence with polio Roosevelt
passed the time reading old atlases.25 A 1942 photograph taken of Roosevelt
with his globe both promotes the use of globes and asserts Roosevelt's control
over the world he surveys (Figure 1). J.B. Harley has commented that "as a
politically laden sign the globe or orb has frequently symbolized sovereignty
over the world" and notes that "in newspapers, on television screens, and in
innumerable political cartoons, military leaders are frequently shown in front of
maps to confirm or reassure their viewers about the writ of power over the
territory in the map."26 This photograph of Roosevelt at his desk leaning toward
his globe assures viewers that the war, and the world, are being carefully managed
under the U.S. president's watchful gaze.
For both cartographers and the American public, World War II brought
about a transformation in the way that the world was understood and represented.
Figure 1: Franklin D. Roosevelt. 1942. Courtesy of Franklin D. Roosevelt
Library, Hyde Park, New York.
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 47
Alan K. Henrikson has argued that the geographers and cartographers of World
War II shared a "definitive substantive conception of the world" that he terms
"Air-Age Globalism."27 One of the central features of this conceptual shift was
a new interest in the sphericity of the earth and the rejection of maps based on
Mercator's projection in favor of globes, which were preferred because they
presented a less distorted, more accurate representation of the earth.28 This change
in geographical psychology was also characterized by a new realization of the
earth's continuity and unity that resulted from seeing and imagining the earth
from an aerial perspective. Finally, the Air-Age Globalists shared a cartographic
fixation on the arctic, which emphasized the geographical proximity of the Soviet
Union to the United States, a factor that Henrikson links to the development of
the Cold War in the period following World War II.
The turn toward Air-Age Globalism among professional geographers and
cartographers also impacted the ways that the American public perceived and
represented the world. The war generated widespread popular interest in
geography, which was fed by the map supplements printed by many newspapers
and magazines, including Fortune, Life, and National Geographic.29 Additionally,
the move from the map to the globe translated into popular interest in acquiring
and using globes: "In order to avoid the strategic fallacies of the 'Mercator
mind,'Americans were sometimes advised to give up looking at deceitful maps
altogether and instead to contemplate their household globes, using pieces of
string rather than rulers for measurement and direction finding."30 Commercial
map firms built cheap globes to meet public demand for this popular
representation of the world. In a 1943 article, "The War of the Maps," geographer
Richard Edes Harrison provides an overview of maps and globes for an American
public eager to track the events of the war. Harrison advocates the use of a
globe and suggests that many of the globes made by commercial map companies
have "eliminated the fixed axis in favor of a universal free movement base," an
innovation allowing the globe to be repositioned from different angles, like
Roosevelt's famous globe.31 A 1943 advertisement in The Saturday Review of
Literature promoted the eight-inch "Liberty" globe from the Denoyer-Geppert
Company as a "World Without an Axis" (Figure 2).
As a reflection of this new-found public interest in geography and globes,
images of globes and spheres meant to evoke the globe began to appear in cultural
texts, including advertising and corporate logos. During the 1940s, Coca-Cola's
print advertisements in U.S. magazines featured the red circle logo, which was
imprinted with an outline of the continents. The Pan-American Airways Terminal
in Miami showcased a huge globe in the lobby of the terminal, measuring 31V2
feet in circumference and weighing 6,000 pounds.
While proponents of Air-Age Globalism subscribed to a view of the world
as an interconnected system that complemented the worldview promoted by the
U.S. Good Neighbor policy, the Air-Age Globalists also rejected the division of
the world into separate hemispheres, one of the foundational concepts used to
48 AmySpellacy
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structure U.S.-Latin American policy during this period. Air-Age Globalists
regarded the notion of the hemisphere as "a willfully generated, self-deceiving,
unscientific 'myth.'" 32 Arthur Whitaker notes that the idea of the Western
Hemisphere, which was the space designated as off limits to European powers
with the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, originated in part with European maps that
divided the world into two halves, one centered on Europe, the other on the
New World.33 In Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives
of U.S. Empire, Gretchen Murphy highlights the connections between the concept
of the Western Hemisphere and U.S. foreign policy, focusing in particular on
how the Monroe Doctrine was dependent on and contributed to the geographic
construction of the hemisphere.34 The Western Hemisphere has conventionally
been defined as "the mathematical half section of the globe extending between
20°W. and 160°E. of Greenwich," including South America, Central America,
the United States, Canada, and parts of Iceland and Greenland.35 A 1940 article
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 49
in The Geographical Review provides a map of the boundaries of the Western
Hemisphere, noting that the Western Hemisphere is "admittedly a shade smaller
than the Eastern Hemisphere" (Figure 3).36
Prior to Pearl Harbor, the United States had drawn the boundaries of the
Western Hemisphere in order to "define a practically defensible security zone
and to increase the political solidarity of North and South America."37 The attack
on Pearl Harbor, of course, pointed out the arbitrariness of this supposedly
defensible zone. The new focus on the use of globes, rather than maps, also
made clear to many that the hemisphere was an artificial geographical construct
that grouped together places that were, in reality, more distant than many nonhemispheric locations.
While the attack on Pearl Harbor required people to rethink the relationship
between the United States and the rest of the world, the idea that the Western
Figure 3: The Western Hemisphere. The Geographical Review 30 (1940),
527.
50 Amy Spellacy
Hemisphere was the most natural strategic alliance for the United States had
been challenged before the momentous attack drew the United States into the
war. In an article in Foreign Affairs in April 1941, Eugene Staley discredited the
notion of self-contained economic regions by proposing that readers consult a
globe and "attach a string to a pin at Madison, Wisconsin," home of Wisconsin
Governor Philip La Follette, a hemispheric isolationist, and rotate the string to
measure distances between Madison and points around the world.38 With this
exercise, readers were to discover that many locations in the Western Hemisphere
were actually much farther away from Madison than locations in other parts of
the world. Staley notes that "no capital in Europe, including Moscow, is as far
from Madison as is Buenos Aires, and only one European capital (Athens) is as
far as Rio de Janeiro."39 He also comments that "Gibraltar is closer to Madison
than is the capital of Bolivia, closer than Tacna or Arica, and closer than any
major city in Brazil or any place at all in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, or
Uruguay."40 Staley discredits the idea that continental or land connections are
the most significant factors to take into account when forming economic or
political alliances, emphasizing instead the ways that oceans function to facilitate
communication and trade.41
For Staley and others who supported a reorientation of U.S. foreign policy
toward Europe, the idea of the Western Hemisphere was seen as an outdated
model for understanding the place of the United States in the world. Staley
discredits the notion of continental unity ultimately to support a stronger alliance
between the United States and Britain:
The United States should regard Western Hemisphere defense
lines as distinctly secondary, to be prepared for emergency
use if the first line breaks and we are forced to fall back for a
last-ditch stand. It is less-risky to stand now for all-out defense,
together with Britain, of the seas and the strong-points
commanding the seas of the whole world—Singapore, Hawaii,
Panama, Gibraltar, Suez, and Britain itself—than to let Britain
go down and then to try to defend the Western Hemisphere
practically alone.42
Staley's view that an alliance with Britain should be prioritized over interAmerican solidarity was echoed by Francis Pickens Miller in a July 1941 article
in Foreign Affairs ,43 Miller emphasizes the strategic importance of the "Atlantic
Area" and suggests that the Western Hemisphere is no longer the defining area
for American foreign policy. He positions the Atlantic Area as "the cradle of our
civilization," and connects the defense of this zone with the "survival of the
American way of life."44
While Roosevelt adopted many of the central ideas of Air-Age Globalism,
he clung to the notion of the Western Hemisphere although the concept of
hemispheres was being challenged by geographers and scholars of foreign policy
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 51
and despite his military, economic, and political commitment to Britain.
Roosevelt's continued allegiance to the idea of the hemisphere can be directly
tied to the wartime economic and political motives of the Good Neighbor policy.
After the United States entered the war, the broad goals of the pre-war policy
were refocused around particular needs, especially the need to secure the natural
resources of Latin America. While the United States continued to pursue the
goals of countering Axis propaganda on the cultural front and courting Latin
American leaders as political allies, the economic needs of war-time production
in the United States added a new element of urgency to the policy. The United
States needed that cup of sugar from its neighbors in the Caribbean, as well as
tin from the mines of Bolivia and rubber from the Amazon region to build
airplanes and tanks for the war overseas. By continuing to promote a rhetoric of
hemispheric solidarity, the United States was able to lay claim to the resources
of Latin America as part of the larger Pan-American war-time effort. Without
the notion of the hemisphere, it would have been much more difficult for the
United States to articulate the relationship of inter-dependence that it sought to
promote. Roosevelt's continued use of the concept of the hemisphere was one
way that the United States used strategic mapping to exert control over the region.
Travel and Virtual Travel in a Shrinking World
Roosevelt's expanded use of the category of neighbor on a hemispheric
scale was facilitated by improvements in transportation technology and
infrastructure that encouraged contact and exchange between the United States
and Latin America, making the concept of the Latin American neighbor more
viable. A 1935 article promoting travel to Latin America in The Literary Digest
highlights the increased accessibility of Latin America for American travelers:
"Mexico and other 'foreign lands a step away' in Central America become more
accessible each year, and passage to the East and West Coasts of South America
is facilitated by more frequent sailings."45
A perceptual shift marked by the idea that the world was becoming a smaller
place had begun to emerge during the 1920s and 1930s, due largely to
improvements in transportation technology that brought people into contact with
one another in new ways. In a letter dated September 12, 1936, Roosevelt
acknowledges this new understanding of the world, using the metaphor of the
hemispheric neighborhood to describe an emerging community of people in the
Americas: "Buenos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro are now nearer to Montreal
and Chicago than Boston was to Philadelphia when the Constitution of the United
States was framed," Roosevelt wrote. "Only since yesterday, it seems the
Hemisphere has become a vast neighborhood."46 The new accessibility of remote
locations through airplane travel contributed to the general sense that the world
was more accessible, and therefore experienced as a smaller space.
The global scope of U.S. involvement in the war accelerated this perceptual
shift, which rejected isolationism in favor of a recognition of new international
52 Amy Spellacy
networks and associations. In a 1944 article in The Journal of Geography, "What
the War Has Taught Us About Geography," George T. Renner suggests that
Technological advances have shrunk and remoulded the world
to where the physical basis of isolation no longer exists. The
airplane and the radio have brought the peoples of the entire
world into a close community which is now smaller in accessrelationships than was the United States twenty-five years ago.
The airplane and the radio have produced a new planetary
human ecology. . . . Masses of unlike peoples are beginning
to rub elbows so sharply, that either perpetual warfare or a
cooperative world order must result.47
Renner suggests that people felt as if the globe were being reshaped and resized
by new technologies, resulting in a new sense of global community.
The promoters of the Good Neighbor policy had long understood that the
policy would be strengthened by increased access between the United States
and Latin America. Thus they made efforts to improve automobile travel through
the Pan American Highway and air travel through Pan American Airways. During
the Good Neighbor policy, the ability to travel between the United States and
Latin America was significantly bolstered by the construction of the Pan American
Highway and the development of an improved network of airplane travel within
the hemisphere, dominated by Pan American Airways.48 While the Pan American
Highway was first conceived of at the Fifth Pan-American Conference in
Santiago, Chile, in 1923, before the beginning of the Good Neighbor policy,
construction of the highway continued throughout the period of the policy.49
Historian George Black suggests that the U.S. auto industry "latched on quickly"
to the idea of the highway, undoubtedly because it provided a new destination
for Americans in their cars and also opened up new markets of car-buyers in
Latin America.50
Pan American Airways, which was subsidized and supported by the U.S.
government, benefited from U.S. commercial and strategic interest in Latin
America by becoming "the government's unofficial 'chosen instrument' for
overseas aviation operations."51 In 1927, the U.S. government initiated this
important relationship with Pan American by awarding the airline the Post Office
mail contract from Key West, Florida, to Havana, Cuba, a route that was later
expanded to include other parts of Latin America. Pan American was also
involved with U.S. operations during World War II and after the war enjoyed a
boom in prosperity because of increased American tourism and international
business travel.
During the 1940s, advertisements for transportation and tourism promoted
travel to South America as a good-neighbor activity. In these ads, South America
is showcased as a glamorous destination where wealthy Americans can experience
romantic sights and historic cities. A Pan-American Grace Airways ad from
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 53
November 1940 appeals to Americans by highlighting the fact that "It's
Springtime in Chile, South America" (Figure 4). The ad features sophisticated
people in eveningwear and promotes the "Panagra Route," a tour of the major
sights in South America. An ad for Moore-McCormack Lines enticed American
travelers to Latin America with the "luxury of a superb cruise liner" and the
"glamour of South America" on the "Good Neighbor Fleet." The ad explained
that the ships sailed from New York and stopped in "ports excitingly beautiful"
throughout South America.52
Both because of the push to imagine Latin Americans as neighbors and
because of the improved travel infrastructure, the 1940s also saw a boom in
travel literature written about Latin America by U.S. authors. In books such as
Constance Matilda Jordan Henley's Grandmother Drives South (1943), Milton
Reynolds' Hasta La Vista (III Be Seeing You) (1944), and Herbert Cerwin's
These Are the Mexicans (1947), the people and places of Latin America were
brought to life with colorful anecdotes and sweeping generalizations about
national character and cultural traditions.53 One of the conventions of these travel
books was to include maps on the inside front and back covers of the book in
order to provide readers with a visual representation of the places described in
the text. The imperial economic motives of the wartime Good Neighbor policy
were particularly evident in these maps, which reflect the U.S. interest in securing
the resources of Latin America for the war effort. These maps can be read as
offering a version of an interconnected world community that benefits the United
States, suggesting that because the United States and Latin America are neighbors,
the United States has a right to the resources of the region. Rather than using the
geographical innovations of the day to re-imagine a more egalitarian, truly
neighborly relationship, both Roosevelt and U.S. travel writers continued to
stake a claim on the land and resources of Latin America.
With little regard for the people and places of Latin America, these maps
present the region as a storehouse of natural resources and a projection of
imperialist fantasies. A map used to illustrate Carleton Beals' 1940 book Pan
America: A Program for the Western Hemisphere labeled each country in Central
America, South America, and the Caribbean in terms of the resources that come
from that country.54 The map, entitled "The South American Storehouse," also
included a list of "potential products" for each country, highlighting the extent
to which the United States saw the region as a territory that could be developed
according to its needs. Guatemala, for example, provided the hemisphere with
coffee, bananas, hides, sugar, and cotton, but also had the potential, according
to Beals, to produce coconuts, rubber, antimony, zinc, iron, and lead. Small line
drawings of products on particular countries add to the effect of defining the
region in terms of the resources it had to offer the United States. Argentina is
illustrated with the head of a steer, and Brazil is indicated with bags of coffee
and diamonds.
The map used to illustrate John L. Strohm's 1943 book I Lived with Latin
Americans follows the tendency of Beals' book to map the hemisphere in terms
54 AmySpellacy
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1940.
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 55
of resources, but goes even further in promoting an imperialist vision of the
region by removing all significant geopolitical markers, such as national
boundaries, and by using cartoon images to illustrate the map, making Latin
America seem childlike and simple (Figure 5).55 The cartoonish quality of the
images and the hand-drawn effect suggests that even an amateur can map this
territory and reinforces the control over the space exhibited by the North
American author of the text. Images of rubber tires, tin cans, sugar cubes, and
banana trees dot the colorful map. The map promotes a colonial vision of the
region by suggesting that resources are unusually abundant and of incomparable
quality, such as the "Grapes as big as lemons" that the map locates in Chile.
In addition to making Latin America seem childish and offering up the
resources of the region for U.S. consumption, this map also includes images
that remind viewers of the long history of colonialism in the Americas, promoting
the idea that Latin America has historically been and continues to be controlled
by outside powers. Mexico features a matador and a charging bull, a reminder
of the Spanish legacy. Cuba is illustrated by a white man puffing on a giant cigar
and a black man holding a bag of sugar, indications of the persistent racial
divisions in Cuban society. A black woman balancing a tray of fruit on her head
stands on the island of Hispaniola, designating that this was the location of the
"First Negroes in America" while making no reference to the slave trade. The
history of the invasion and colonization of the region is trivialized and
romanticized with the image of a ship near the island of San Salvador (or
Watling's Island), in the Bahamas, labeled "Columbus' First Landing," and with
the image of a pirate straddling several islands in the Caribbean, the location of
"Old Pirate Lairs." A group of islands off the coast of Peru are labeled as "Guano
Islands" to indicate their importance as a source of the fertilizer composed of
seabird droppings, a major nineteenth-century export from South America to
Europe. Juan Fernandez Island, off the coast of Chile, is labeled "Robinson
Crusoe's Island," in honor of the famous colonial adventure novel by Daniel
Defoe which was inspired by the island. The protagonist of the novel is pictured
with Friday, the native man that Crusoe saved from cannibals and then enslaved,
naming him Friday to commemorate the day on which he was "rescued." There
are also several tourist attractions indicated on the map, including "Maya Ruins"
in the Yucatan and Iguassu Falls, located at the border of Brazil and Argentina.
The 1945 Disney film The Three Caballeros, which uses the trope of virtual
travel to introduce audiences to the region, replicates the vicarious experience
of learning about Latin America through travel literature.56 The Three Caballeros,
a full-length Technicolor feature, was one of several films to emerge from material
collected by Walt Disney and select members of his staff on three research trips
to Latin America between 1941 and 1943.57 Working in cooperation with the
Office of the Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs, the U.S. government office
concerned with the cultural promotion of the Good Neighbor policy, Disney
also produced a documentary of the group's travels, South of the Border with
56 Amy Spellacy
êm : t-MÊm
Figure 5: John L. Strohm, I Lived with Latin Americans (Danville, 111.: The
Interstate, 1943).
Disney (1941), and a film that combined documentary footage with a series of
animated shorts, Saludos Amigos (1943). The Three Caballeros centers on the
adventures of three central cartoon bird characters, Donald Duck, representing
the United States, Panchito, a gun-toting Mexican Revolutionary rooster, and
Joe Carioca, a parrot dressed as a Brazilian businessman, with an umbrella,
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 57
bowler hat, and cigar.58 The film opens with Donald Duck receiving a surprise
package from his friends in Latin America that contains three separately wrapped
gifts. Each of the three "gifts" offers Donald an opportunity to learn about Latin
America through virtual travel. That Donald receives these "gifts" from Latin
America sets the stage for a film in which Latin America offers itself to Donald
Duck and therefore to the United States.
The first package contains a projector and a film entitled Aves Raras, or
Rare Birds, that teaches Donald about various species of birds in Latin America,
introducing the theme of virtual travel. The second package is a book entitled
Brasil. When Donald opens the book, Joe Carioca steps out and invites Donald
to enter the book with him to learn more about Brazil. By framing the adventure
sequences with Donald stepping in and out of the book, the film continues to
emphasize the parallels between reading about Latin America, an opportunity
available to American audiences watching the film, and Donald's adventures.
The third package that Donald opens is a Mexican pifiata that also contains a
book entitled Mexico. Once again, the book serves as an indicator of the
possibilities of virtual travel. The three birds enter and leave the book Mexico
on a magic serape that allows them to fly high above the region and zoom in on
particular places to experience Mexican culture, such as folk dancing in Veracruz.
At one point, Panchito also holds up a photograph for his friends as he tells
them about the Mexican Christmas tradition of las posadas. Throughout the
film, books, photos, maps, and movies function as Donald's inroads to learning
about Latin American culture, with Joe Carioca and Panchito serving as the tour
guides on his virtual adventures.59 The film blurs virtual travel and actual travel
by having the books come alive with three-dimensional, pop-up pages and live
action photos and movie segments, promoting the idea that everyone can share
in Donald's experiences.
Like the maps from U.S. travel books, which define Latin America in terms
of resources available for U.S. consumption, The Three Caballeros maps the
region in terms of U.S. desires, substituting the women of Latin America for the
resources coveted and claimed in the maps. Both the maps and the film offer the
fantasy of unobstructed access to the resources and women of Latin America.
The original theatrical trailer for The Three Caballeros pitches the film's
technological innovation in combining live action and animation, describing
this aspect of the film as "the newest thing to hit the movies since talking pictures
came in," and provides a preview of the three female Latin American entertainers
featured in the live-action segments, Aurora Miranda, Carmen Miranda's sister;
Carmen Molina, a Mexican dancer; and Dora Luz, a Mexican radio and screen
star.60 The trailer also appeals to audiences by promising "a whole screen full of
Latin American lovelies" in addition to the three central female stars.
In The Three Caballeros, Latin America is positioned as the object of sexual
desire for Donald Duck, who is represented as an oversexed sailor whose
experience of the region involves chasing women in the various countries visited
58 Amy Spellacy
by the three "caballeros."61 On the one hand, Donald Duck's status as a cartoon
character who imitates stereotypical sailor behavior makes his predatory pursuit
of real women less threatening. However, if Donald is viewed as a stand-in for
the Disney corporation or for actual U.S. military personnel, then the romantic
adventures of the cartoon bird, the source of much of the humor of the film,
disguise the real threat of U.S. corporate and military aggression beneath an
innocent veneer. In a particularly telling scene, the three birds fly over Acapulco
beach on a magic serape, admiring the Mexican women sunning themselves.
Donald is so overcome with attraction that he jumps from the serape and, as he
plummets toward the beach, takes the shape of a bomb targeting the women.
The women in swimsuits screech and take cover as Donald dive-bombs them.
In a later scene, Donald daydreams about all the women he has seen in Latin
America while images of throbbing hearts fill the screen and he repeats a mantra
of "pretty girls, pretty girls."
The live action segments of the film focus primarily on the romantically
charged interactions between Donald and the three female entertainers from
Latin America. His interest in the women is often reciprocated, suggesting that
Latin American women are available and receptive to the advances of North
American men. In the world represented in the film, there are no men to challenge
Donald, except for the other two "caballeros," who occasionally restrain him,
but generally support him in his quest for Latin beauties. Although the film was
shown to audiences in the United States and Latin America, it creates a surreal
world where Latin American women sing, dance, and proffer their bodies, and
the fruits of their countries, for Donald and for the United States, reminding
viewers of cultural and sexual hierarchies controlled by North American men.
By substituting Aurora Miranda for her sister Carmen in the role of a Brazilian
Bahiana, The Three Caballeros builds on the image of Carmen Miranda, perhaps
the most famous feminized representation of the region from this period. With
the fruits of Latin America literally piled onto her head, Miranda suggestively
offered Latin America up for U.S. consumption.
The maps from U.S. travel literature and The Three Caballeros serve as
evidence of the ways that cultural texts reinforced the rhetoric of the Good
Neighbor policy. While they endorse the idea of the hemispheric neighborhood,
they also highlight the unevenness of the supposedly reciprocal relationship
promoted by the policy. By reading travel books, watching films about the region,
and following the geography of the war with their globes, people in the United
States mapped and claimed Latin America as a part of the inter-American
neighborhood and were introduced to the idea of a broader world community.
Conclusion: From the Hemisphere to the Unisphere
Although the metaphor of the good neighbor faded into the background
during the postwar period, it provided the foundation for a new rhetoric of
internationalism that placed the United States at the center of the expanding
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 59
U.S. neighborhood. The "It's a Small World" exhibit at the 1964-65 World's
Fair provides a way of examining the legacy of the good neighbor, illustrating
one way that the rhetoric of the Good Neighbor policy continued to resonate in
U.S. culture, long after the policy had been discontinued.
While some scholars have suggested that the Good Neighbor policy ended
with Roosevelt's death in 1945, others have pointed to the significance of the
1947 Truman Doctrine and the realignment of U.S. foreign policy goals toward
the Marshall Plan in Europe in signaling the end of the policy. With the Truman
Doctrine, the United States "assumed the right to police the globe against
communist threats wherever they were detected," essentially reverting to the
same principles that guided pre-Good-Neighbor-era U.S.-Latin American
relations and inaugurating the logic of the Cold War.62 Historians of the early
Cold War period suggest that the virulently anti-Communist rhetoric of the
Truman Doctrine was employed by the administration as a way of convincing
the increasingly isolationist U.S. public of the need to undertake a massive
European Recovery Program, a plan that Truman felt was necessary to ease the
U.S. economy through the postwar period by turning Europe into an economic
partner of the United States.63
Writing in 1954, Arthur Whitaker suggested that during the immediate
postwar years, the concept of the Western hemisphere lost relevance and
temporarily gave way to an enthusiasm for globalism. According to Whitaker,
the ideal of global community was soon replaced by Cold War divisions: "After
1940 the substance of the Western Hemisphere idea was lost, and its place was
taken first and briefly by globalism and then by new twofold divisions of the
globe, not into the traditional Eastern and Western hemispheres, but into Northern
and Southern hemispheres, or, more frequently, into the communist and
noncommunist worlds."64 In spite of the predominance of these new Cold War
divisions, I suggest that the rhetoric of hemispheric community that emerged
during the 1940s informed postwar ideas of international community that lingered
on during the Cold War and helped place the United States at the center of the
global economic and political community.
The 1964-65 World's Fair, a public event concerned with projecting an
image of the relationship between the United States and the larger world
community, provides evidence of the links between the rhetoric of the Good
Neighbor policy and postwar internationalism. Held at Flushing Meadow, in
Queens, New York, on the site of the 1939-40 World's Fair, the 1964-65 fair
was centered on the theme "Man in a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe."
The fair had a two-year run, from April 22-October 18, 1964, and from April
21-October 17,1965. It featured 141 pavilions, sponsored by U.S. corporations,
individual states, and countries around the world. The most prominent
manifestation of the fair's theme was the Unisphere, a twelve-foot high stainless
steel model of the earth, designed and fabricated by the United States Steel
Corporation. The Unisphere was located at the center of the fairgrounds at the
60 AmySpellacy
Fountain of the Continents and was featured on tickets and promotional materials
for the fair (Figure 6).
On the one hand, the physical and symbolic presence of the Unisphere at
the fair directly challenged the construct of the hemisphere that had guided the
logic and rhetoric of the Good Neighbor policy. While the idea of the hemisphere
suggested that the world could be geographically divided into sections, and that
these divisions had political and economic implications, the Unisphere provided
a model of global unity. The shift away from the hemisphere and emphasis on
the Unisphere at the fair echoed and built on the ideas of Air-Age Globalists,
but also reflected U.S. economic and political agendas during the 1960s. At a
time when the United States was focused on space exploration and concerned
with Communism in Asia, the concept of the hemispheric neighborhood was no
longer as relevant as it had once been. The fair reflected the massive shifts that
had taken place in U.S. culture following World War II by promoting a global
(rather than hemispheric) vision of world community, celebrating scientific and
technological advancements, and showcasing the rise of U.S. corporate culture.
However, in spite of the move away from the hemisphere represented by
the presence of the Unisphere, the "It's a Small World" exhibit at the fair
illustrates how the rhetoric of the Good Neighbor policy provided the foundation
for later models of international community that positioned the United States in
the new role of global superpower. The "It's a Small World" exhibit, created by
Disney for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and sponsored by
Pepsi, provides evidence of vestigial hemispheric rhetoric at the fair. Walt Disney
personally asked Disney artist Mary Blair to come out of retirement to design
the exhibit, which was inspired by Blair's work in The Three Caballeros, one of
the defining cultural texts produced to promote the policy. Blair, who was
particularly well known for her representations of children and her vibrant
palettes, had been invited to accompany Disney and other Disney artists on the
1941 research trip to South America. On location in South America, Blair worked
on conceptual paintings for the Disney features Saludos, Amigos and The Three
Caballeros.65 Blair also traveled to Mexico on a survey trip in December 1942
and to Cuba to conduct preliminary research in 1943.66 In addition to shaping
Disney's contributions to the Good Neighbor policy, Blair also painted two
murals for Carmen Miranda's living room in 1945.67
Blair's sequence on the Mexican Christmas tradition of lasposadas featured
in The Three Caballeros later served as inspiration for "It's a Small World."
Blair was responsible for the overall design and color styling of the exhibit,
which promotes global harmony by taking visitors in boats on a virtual tour of
the world, passing through Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas, ending
in the United States. Along the way, dolls in native costumes represent children
from around the world by performing local dances and playing local instruments
while the song "It's a Small World" provides the unifying soundtrack. Laudan
Nooshin draws attention to the similarities between the ride and a "colonial
voyage of discovery" and suggests that the Euro-American, middle-class
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 61
Figure 6: Ticket to the 1964-1965 World's Fair.
passengers have relative mobility and agency while the dolls remain fixed in
position, on display in a manner that recalls the exhibition of native peoples at
late nineteenth and early twentieth-century world fairs and exhibitions.68 The
song, which follows predominantly Euro-American musical conventions,
revolves around the idea that "we all sing the same song," homogenizing and
appropriating the culture of the "others" featured in the ride.69
The predominant narrative of the ride is one of symbolic control over the
rest of the world, by the U.S. Disney corporation and, by association, the United
States. The ride suggests a global world community, in line with the theme of
the fair as a whole, while also providing a colonial experience for people in the
United States, placing them in a position of power in relation to people from
less developed areas of the world. Like images of Roosevelt surveying his globe,
which supported the strategic mapping techniques employed during the era of
the Good Neighbor policy, the ride symbolically establishes U.S. global
dominance through its creation of a vision of global harmony. In "It's a Small
World," which was moved to Disneyland in 1966 and added to Walt Disney
World in 1971, the United States serves as the puppeteer pulling the strings
while the children of the world assure audiences of their cheerful participation
in this vision.
Roosevelt's use of the metaphor of the good neighbor helped the United
States to forge a new image of itself as a global power and make the transition to
a position of dominance in the newly globalized world community following
62 Amy Spellacy
World War II. Neil Smith has suggested that the contemporary phenomenon of
globalization needs to be understood as the result of an ongoing process that
began during the early decades of the twentieth century, pointing to World War
II as a watershed moment for the emergence of the United States as a global
superpower. In his book on Roosevelt's geographer Isaiah Bowman, Smith draws
a connection between World War II, the development of U.S. imperialism, and
contemporary political and economic globalization:
There is no way to understand where the global shifts of the
last twenty years came from or where they will lead without
understanding how, throughout the twentieth century, U.S.
corporate, political, and military power mapped an emerging
empire
First and foremost, though by no means exclusively,
"globalization" was made in America and was built around
U.S. interests and ideologies, but it was also established from
the beginning of the twentieth century rather than simply at
its end.70
As a key component in Roosevelt's domestic and international political rhetoric,
the metaphor of the good neighbor helped Roosevelt to articulate and realize
his vision of a new role for the United States in the global community.
And yet, although the metaphor of the good neighbor was no longer a central
component of the rhetoric of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, U.S.
preoccupation with the threat of Communism in the hemisphere suggests that
the hemisphere was still an important category and that hemispheric proximity
still mattered, as evidenced by the 1954 U.S.-led overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz
in Guatemala. The global frenzy stirred up over the possibility of the spread of
Communism made it especially urgent to deal with this issue in Latin America,
where the specter of Communism created a sense of hemispheric crisis because
of the geographic proximity to the United States. Arbenz, who had instituted
agrarian reform and expropriated hundreds of thousands of acres of land
belonging to United Fruit, was replaced by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, a
military officer recruited by the CIA to lead the invasion force. Castillo Armas
reversed the changes initiated by Arbenz and implemented policies more in line
with U.S. economic and political goals.
And of course the United States was obsessed with the threat posed by
Fidel Castro's government in Cuba, seen as especially menacing because of the
proximity of Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. In many ways,
Roosevelt's 1941 view of the hemisphere as a protective barrier continued to
shape U.S. policy regarding Cuba during the Cold War, most notably with the
Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October
1962, events driven by a desire to keep Communism at bay within the hemisphere
and protect the U.S. mainland from the danger of a Soviet attack. In a statement
issued on September 4,1962, President Kennedy referred to the threat posed by
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 63
Communism worldwide, but focused especially on the threat to the hemisphere:
"The Cuban question must be considered as a part of the worldwide challenge
posed by Communist threats to peace. It must be dealt with as a part of that
larger issue as well as in the context of the special relationships which have long
characterized the inter-American System."71 In this same speech, Kennedy speaks
of the need to protect the hemisphere as the primary motive for continuing to
monitor the actions of Castro:
It continues to be the policy of the United States that the Castro
regime will not be allowed to export its aggressive purposes
by force or the threat of force. It will be prevented by whatever
means may be necessary from taking action against any part
of the Western Hemisphere. The United States, in conjunction
with other Hemisphere countries, will make sure that while
increased Cuban armaments will be a heavy burden to the
unhappy people of Cuba themselves, they will be nothing
more.72
The rhetorical weight given to the idea of hemispheric community suggests that
it was still a significant category.
But even if the hemisphere still mattered, it was clear that the United States
was no longer interested in being good neighbors. A1961 political cartoon from
the Philadelphia Inquirer symbolizes the extent to which the Good Neighbor
policy was discarded and replaced by the principles that had previously guided
U.S. policy with Latin America. In the cartoon, a Latin American man, wearing
sandals and a large sombrero, is shown taking a nap while leaning against a tree
marked with the words "Good Neighbor Policy." The faceless man has his hand
extended, as if waiting for a hand-out, while a bag of money marked "U.S. Aid"
dangles from a branch above him.73 This openly hostile image reiterates the
classic theme that Latin Americans are unable to manage their own affairs and
implies that they are too lazy and unmotivated to help themselves.
Ironically, Castro himself was to later use the metaphor of the good neighbor
to describe the relationship he wanted to see between the United States and
Cuba. In 1975, when President Gerald Ford had taken steps toward normalizing
relations with Cuba and ending the fifteen-year old trade embargo, U.S. journalist
Barbara Walters asked Castro, "What would you like Americans to know about
you and Cuba? And could you possibly say it in English, so they could
understand?"74 After initially protesting that his English is not very good, Castro
answered, "Wish of understanding. Wish of friendship. I understand it is not
easy. We belong to two different worlds. But I, we a r e . . . " At this point, Castro,
searching for the right word, leaned over to his interpreter and asked "^Como se
dice vecinol" and finished his sentence by declaring the United States and Cuba
to be "neighbors." He continued, "And in one way or another, we ought to live
in peace. The United States and Cuba."75
64 AmySpellacy
Notes
1. Sallie A. Marston, "The Social Construction of Scale," Progress in Human Geography
24, no. 2 (2000): 233.
2. In this essay, I use the term "virtual" to describe the experiences of people in the United
States who vicariously learned about Latin America through the words and images of others in
books, films, and radio broadcasts. I do not mean to evoke contemporary uses of the term to
describe experiences mediated by computer technology.
3. Historians typically mark the beginning of the Good Neighbor policy with either Hoover's
1928 goodwill tour of Latin America or with Roosevelt's inaugural address on March 4, 1933.
Roosevelt dedicated the majority of his 1933 address to outlining a program of domestic economic
recovery and encouraging Americans to brace themselves for the hard work that lay ahead in
battling the depression. Although the speech does not specifically mention Latin America, the
one short paragraph on foreign policy is usually cited as FDR's declaration of the Good Neighbor
policy: "In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good
neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the
rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his
agreements in and with a world of neighbors." See Edgar B. Nixon, éd., Franklin D. Roosevelt
and Foreign Affairs (3 vols.; Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), I:
20.
4. Neil Smith, "Homeless/Global: Scaling Places," in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures,
Global Change, ed. John Bird, et al. (London: Routledge, 1993), 99.
5. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Maiden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991).
6. Marston, "The Social Construction of Scale," 220.
7. Smith, "Homeless/Global: Scaling Places," 101.
8. Ibid., 90.
9. Neil Brenner, "State Territorial Restructuring and the Production of Spatial Scale: Urban
and Regional Planning in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1960-1990," Political Geography
16 (May 1997): 280.
10. Smith, "Homeless/Global: Scaling Places," 105.
11. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 82.
12. Franklin D. Roosevelt, "On the Declaration of War with Japan," Radio Address,
December 9, 1941. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives, www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu
(accessed May 1, 2006).
13. See Scott, Seeing Like a State, 82.
14. J.B. Harley, "Maps, Knowledge, and Power," in The New Nature of Maps: Essays in
the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001),
54.
15. Ibid., 53.
16. Alexander Cowie, "The Arts and the War," The Saturday Review of Literature, June 28,
1941, 3.
17. During his first two terms in office Roosevelt used the "good neighbor" to describe and
promote his domestic as well as his international policies. The metaphor of the good neighbor
served as a bridge between Roosevelt's domestic and international policies and programs,
signifying ideals of service and community in both realms. Most significantly, the metaphor of
the good neighbor was used by the Good Neighbor League to defend and sell Roosevelt's New
Deal policies to U.S. citizens during the 1936 re-election campaign. The League, which was
formed by a group of influential supporters to assist with Roosevelt's re-election, launched a
comprehensive publicity campaign that emphasized the social and economic progress already
achieved through the New Deal and outlined a program for the future that stressed interdependence
and mutual understanding across economic, racial, and religious divisions in the United States.
18. Alan K. Henrikson, "The Map as an 'Idea': The Role of Cartographic Imagery During
the Second World War," The American Cartographer 2, no. 1 (1975): 20.
19. Ibid., 21.
20. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Radio Address, February 23, 1942, "Fireside Chats," Franklin
D. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives, www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu (accessed May 1, 2006).
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Museum Display, July 21, 2004; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.
24. Ibid.
25. Isaiah Bowman, "Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1882-1945," The Geographical Review
35 (July 1945): 349.
26. Harley, "Maps, Knowledge, and Power," 71-73.
Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor 65
27. Henrikson, "The Map as an 'Idea,'" 24.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 23.
30. Ibid., 26.
31. Richard Edes Harrison, "The War of the Maps: A Famous Cartographer Surveys the
Field," The Saturday Review of Literature, August 7, 1943, 25.
32. Henrikson, "The Map as an 'Idea,'" 28.
33. Arthur P. Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1954), 7.
34. Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of
U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). By suggesting that the rhetoric of the Good
Neighbor policy also relied on and participated in shaping the geographical construct of the
Western Hemisphere, I am making an argument that runs parallel to Murphy's argument. However,
I argue that the relationship between the idea of the Western Hemisphere and the Good Neighbor
policy is especially striking given that the architects of the policy clung to the concept of the
hemisphere at a time when it was challenged by geographers. While Murphy points to the
simultaneous decline of the Monroe Doctrine and the idea of the hemisphere during the 1930s, I
suggest that the hemisphere was kept alive by the Good Neighbor policy in order to provide a
structure and logic for U.S.-Latin American policy through the 1940s, in spite of the scientific
push to abandon the concept.
35. Henrikson, "The Map as an 'Idea,'" 30.
36. Lawrence Martin, "The Geography of the Monroe Doctrine and the Limits of the Western
Hemisphere," The Geographical Review 30 (July 1940): 526.
37. Henrikson, "The Map as an 'Idea,'" 28.
38. Eugene Staley, "The Myth of the Continents," Foreign Affairs 19 (April 1941): 485.
Staley establishes his position in contrast to books that supported hemispheric isolationism,
including Charles A. Beard, A Foreign Policyfor America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1940), Jerome
Frank, Save America First: How to Make Our Democracy Work (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1938), and Stuart Chase, The New Western Front (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1939).
39. Staley, "The Myth of the Continents," 485.
40. Ibid.
41. Staley argues that "In short, land connections, which would appear to establish easy
contact between peoples on the same continent, may be barriers as well as connections, while
bodies of water, appearing superficially on the map as barriers, may actually be most important
connecting links" (486-87).
42. Ibid., 494.
43. Francis Pickens Miller, "The Atlantic Area," Foreign Affairs 19 (July 1941): 727-28.
44. Ibid., 728.
45. "The Americas Brought Nearer," The Literary Digest, June 1, 1935, 47.
46. Nixon, éd., Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs, III: 423.
47. George T. Renner, "What the War Has Taught Us About Geography," Journal of
Geography 43 (December 1944): 326.
48. In The Good Neighbor: How the United States Wrote the History of Central America
and the Caribbean (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), George Black also suggests that these
improvements in transportation technology encouraged North Americans to travel to Latin America:
"the United States' first strides in international airline and road travel opened up Central America
to large-scale tourism, while Good-Neighbor sentiment encouraged travelers to believe that the
local inhabitants were really their brothers and sisters (or at least their country cousins) under the
skin" (62).
49. Black, The Good Neighbor, 65.
50. Ibid.
51. Wesley Phillips Newton, "Pan American Airways," The Encyclopedia of American
Business History and Biography (New York: Facts on File, 1988), 343.
52. Advertisement for Moore-McCormack Lines, National Geographic, June 1948.
53. Constance Matilda Jordan Henley, Grandmother Drives South (New York: G.P. Putnams
Sons, 1943); Milton Reynolds, Hasta La Vista (I'11 Be Seeing You) (New York: Greenburg, 1944);
Herbert Cerwin, These Are the Mexicans (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947).
54. Carleton Beals, Pan America: A Program for the Western Hemisphere (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1940).
55. John L. Strohm, I Lived with Latin Americans (Danville, 111.: Interstate, 1943).
56. The Three Caballeros, 1945, Directed by Norman Ferguson, Walt Disney Home Video,
2000, DVD.
57. Julianne Burton-Carvajal, "'Surprise Package': Looking Southward with Disney," in
Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Smoodin (New York: Routledge,
1994), 133.
66 Amy Spellacy
58. Walt Disney's close working relationship with the Office of the Coordinator of InterAmerican Affairs is well documented and has been examined by contemporary scholars. For
more information on Disney's support of the war effort and of the Good Neighbor policy, see
Smoodin's edited collection, Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. See especially
Smoodin's "Introduction: How to Read Walt Disney," Julianne Burton-Carvajal's '"Surprise
Package': Looking Southward with Disney," José Piedra's "Pato Donald's Gender Ducking,"
and Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb's "Cultural Contagion: On Disney's Health Education
Films for Latin America." Burton-Carvajal reads The Three Caballeros as an allegory of firstworld colonialism and suggests that the film employs "Good-Neighborliness as foil for empirebuilding as usual" (147). José Piedra considers sexual innuendoes and gender in the same film.
For a general overview of Disney's involvement in Latin America, see "South of the Border with
Disney," Chapter 4 of Richard Shale's Donald Duck Joins Up: The Walt Disney Studio During
World War II (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982).
59. Burton-Carvajal also comments on the ways that Donald is transported into the
spectacular world of the other during the film. She suggests that the core segments of the film
focus on a "dual configuration" of "demonstration and transportation" and that in the sections
focused on transportation, Donald's "passive contemplation gives way to direct participation"
(137).
60. "Theatrical Trailer," The Three Caballeros, 1945.
61. Julianne Burton-Carvajal and José Piedra also discuss Donald's overactive libido.
62. Black, The Good Neighbor, 89.
63. See Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthy ism:
Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946-1948 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1972).
64. Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea, 154-55.
65. John Canemaker, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair: An Appreciation (New York: Disney
Editions, 2003), ix.
66. Ibid., 20.
67. Ibid., 22.
68. Laudan Nooshin, "Circumnavigation with a Difference? Music, Representation and
the Disney Experience," Ethnomusicology Forum 13 (November 2004): 240. Nooshin also
discusses how the ride masks the realities of exploitation and domination of global corporations,
such as Disney.
69. Nooshin, "Circumnavigation with a Difference," 243.
70. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 4.
71. U.S. Department of State, Bulletin XLVII (September 24, 1962). Read to news
correspondents on September 4, by Pierre Salinger, White House Press Secretary.
72. Ibid.
73. John J. Johnson, Latin America in Caricature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980),
67.
74. Archival film footage used in documentary Fidel Castro, written, produced, and directed
by Adriana Bosch, PBS American Experience, 2005.
75. Ibid.